Today, many companies monitor message boards, social media pages, and other domain-based forums related to their businesses. On these sites, customers will posts problems, suggestions, complaints, etc. with the goal of hearing from other people/customers about possible solutions. The unique attribute of these sites, compared to company websites, is that they are public and not controlled by the company that is monitoring the site. This provides customers a way to get information from non-company sources that may include unbiased opinions and options, including ones the company may not want to state or highlight. This may be an advantage to the company, such as when customer advocates of the brand provide correct and positive “free” support and help regarding products and services. This has the potential to considerably reduce the cost of company-provided support.
One problem a company will face in this endeavor is that to foster an active user community of people to address issues, the company must allow time for the user community to address the issues. Since the customers are not usually paid to provide this support, it could be minutes, hours, or days before an answer appears. If the company provides appropriate staff and answers everything quickly, the company may lose the benefit and engagement of consumer advocates. If the company waits too long, customer satisfaction may be impacted.
Social media and forum communities often self-heal within 30 minutes of an original post when a company has nurtured the relationship with consumer advocates. Some companies incentivize the proactive consumer advocate engagement to develop community support. When a post is negative, a social engagement strategy adopted by some businesses is to wait for approximately 30 minutes to see if the self-healing takes place before the company engages. Some companies have policies to wait as long as several days. One key response time metric for first contact in the social media forum is less than 60 minutes with the perception that social customer care is available 24×7 (not just during standard business hours). Regardless of the time limits set by a company or expectations from the community, a second problem is that the monitoring and engagement is a manual and expensive process.